Suggested Resources

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Professional, Technical Writing

These OWL resources will help you conduct research and compose documents for the workplace, such as memoranda and business letters. This section also includes resources for writing report and scientific abstracts.

This resource explains the two dominant ideas in professional writing that will help you produce persuasive, usable résumés, letters, memos, reports, white papers, etc. This section outlines the concepts of rhetorical awareness and user-centered design, provides examples of these ideas, and it contains a glossary of terms.

Audience Analysis: Building Information About Your Readers? discusses your communication's complex audience and provides key questions you can ask to determine readers' needs, values, and attitudes. This section also provides useful charts to help you with your audience analysis.

When you are revising your résumé or other business messages, there are priorities of concerns in choosing what to look for and work on. This handout provides tips for reviewing the content and quality of your business documents.

The HATS presentation introduces students and instructors to the basic elements of document design. The presentation outlines how to use headings, (information) access, typography (fonts), and space in routine professional documents to promote user-centered communication.

This handout will help you solve your memo-writing problems by discussing what a memo is, describing the parts of memos, and providing examples and explanations that will make your memos more effective.

The resources in this section discuss various aspects of writing donation request letters. This includes a discussion of the rhetorical situation and standard formatting/style issues. Writing strong donation request letters can increase the likelihood that your target audience will be receptive to your request.

A white paper is a certain type of report that is distinctive in terms of purpose, audience, and organization. This resource will explain these issues and provide some other tips to enhance white paper content.

These resources describe two workplace genres, an activity report and a postmortem. It discusses the purpose of an activity report and a postmortem, as well as how to work with these genres effectively.